The present invention relates generally to building automation systems. More particularly, the invention relates to a software application development system or framework to facilitate constructing complex building automation applications, including applications that may be distributed across multiple nodes on a network.
Sophisticated building automation software systems, such as those intended for distribution across multiple nodes on a network, can take many thousands of programmer hours to construct and test. Currently, there are few application tools to aid developers in building complex systems of this nature. Much of the system design remains an art form that system developers learn only through experience. Under this conventional application development paradigm much effort must be expended to insure that the best practices are propagated to all members of the development team. Otherwise, the end product application may not behave in a consistent fashion.
The need to embed experienced programmers' knowledge and company best practices into the application relegates most sophisticated application development efforts to highly experienced development teams. Unfortunately, such teams are always in short demand. It would be preferable if application development could be made simpler, so that sophisticated applications could be built by less experienced developers. In the building automation field, it would be highly desirable to have an application development system that embeds expert knowledge about building automation-specific issues, freeing the application developer to design higher level, application-centric systems without worry over the device-dependent details.
Towards this end, the present invention provides an application framework that developers with varying levels of experience can use to construct complex and sophisticated building automation systems. The application framework of the invention is an object-oriented framework based on a predefined superclass from which individual application modules are derived. These modules embed various device-dependent and controller-dependent aspects of the system design, so that the application developer need not be concerned with those details.
The application framework provides a library of such modules, in the form of standard objects, assemblies and smaller function-specific applications that the user can connect together to build more complex systems. The objects are designed to communicate with one another through connection objects and surrogate objects, allowing the application modules to be distributed across multiple nodes of a network. The framework insures that these application modules know how to communicate with one another and such communication is effected without the need for the application developer to be concerned with this detail. The application framework thus embeds the knowledge and best practices of experienced building automation system designers, allowing less experienced software developers to cost effectively build sophisticated building automation systems.
For a more complete understanding of the invention, its objects and advantages, reference may be had to the following specification and to the accompanying drawings.